Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 17 September 2018 | Page 22
ajay sukumaran
blown beans
Dark Roast Graves
Buried under landslides, low global prices, Coorg’s coffee planters peer into oblivion
by Ajay Sukumaran in coorg
A
fully-done crossword puzzle is
on the table next to Chitra
Subbaiah who confesses that
she could forego reading the
newspaper, but not the cross-
word. We are in the cottage of
a home-stay in Madapura, north
Coorg, resplendent in the evening
sun—the first day in two months that
the rain has let up. It brings some rel
ief from fear. Chitra, nearing eighty,
recounts a painful experience with
great fortitude. “You have to do some
22 Outlook 17 September 2018
mental jugglery, you know. You can’t
curse your fate.” She’s staying in a
friend’s cottage because her home, in
the neighbouring village of Hattihole,
now lies beneath a pile of earth which
slid down the hillside, burying
everything she owned.
“Wiped out, totally. I don’t have one pin.
There is nothing to say there was a
house,” she tells Outlook. All she could
reach out for in time were her spectacles,
medicines and some gold the workers
from her coffee estate had entrusted her
with safekeeping. The workers’ quarters
on her coffee estate too went down.
Fortunately, they had had time to move
out. She points to others in the same
situation. “At least I can rent a house
and stay. What about so many others,
who have nothing,” she asks.
Before the rains started this year, coffee
planters in Coorg were talking of a good
crop—the plants were well rested after a
lean year and went through the process
of blossoming and forming fruits.
That settled, seasonal certainty is gone
with the wind and merciless lashings of
torrential rain. It rained heavily through
July and August in this region of south
Karnataka bordering Kerala. Then, in